Far Out

by Damon Knight

  Pendrath looked up as Jenkins slid into the booth next to him. “Ah, my friend,” he said blurrily, “how I regret your poor planet.”

  “You don’t like our planet?” said Jenkins.

  “No, it is a nice little planet. Extremely picturesque. Pardon me.” Pendrath sipped from the glass he was holding. He blinked, and straightened up slightly.

  “You must understand, that is Galactic progress,” he said. “It cannot be helped. We all must go some day.”

  Jenkins looked at him critically. “You’ve been having quite a few of those, haven’t you?” he said. “I thought you people were immune to alcohol, or something.”

  “No, it is the aps—as—aspirin,” said the alien. He produced a small bottle, and solemnly shook a tablet out into his palm. “Your liquors gave me a headache, and so I took an apsirin—aspirin—and your aspirin is wonderful.” He looked lugubrious. “To think, no more aspirin. No more church bazaar. No more baseball.”

  “Why, what’s going to happen to them?”

  Pendrath spread his fingers and made an expressive fizzing noise with his mouth. “Blooie,” he said.

  Jenkins said increduously, “You’re going to blow up the world?”

  The alien nodded sadly. “Soon our building will be finished. Then we will put in the big machines, and drill, drill.”

  He made twisting motions downward with one hand. “We will drill to the core. Then we will drop the transformer and close up the shaft. Then we will go away. Then your poor little planet will go—” he made the fizzing noise again—“Blooie.”

  Jenkins” fists were clenched. “But why? Why would you do a thing like that?”

  “For dust,” Pendrath explained. “Your little planet will all be dust. No big pieces left—nothing bigger than this.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together, squinting, to show how tiny. “We are making defences for the Galaxy. This sector is too open. We will make a little screen of dust here. If there is dust, a ship cannot go very fast. The dust slows it down. Some places, there is already dust. Other places, we will make it. It is the only way to protect ourselves from invasion.”

  “Invasion by whom?”

  Pendrath shrugged. “Who can tell? We have to look ahead.”

  Jenkins” hands began to shake. He took a dog-eared notebook out of his pocket, thumbing it open automatically; he looked at it and put it back. His hands didn’t want to do anything but make fists. He said thickly, “You lousy—” and swung a left to Pendrath’s beaky face.

  The blow never landed. His fist slowed down and stopped; strain as hard as he would, he couldn’t push it any farther.

  “No, no,” said Pendrath, smiling sadly. “No use. I regret very much.”

  Jenkins” heart was thumping. “Why us?” he burst out angrily. “If you had to have dust, why couldn’t you take one of the other planets? Jupiter, Venus—any of them—why pick the one we live on?”

  Pendrath blinked at him. “But on your other planets no one lives,” he said. “Who, then, would do the work for us?” He popped another tablet into his mouth. “And besides,” he said “remember that this dust will make a blanket around your sun. It will make the planets very cold. You see, I have thought of all these things. And then suppose we went to some other sun, and did not come here at all. It would be just the same. You would make big spaceships, and we would have to come and finish you anyway. This way, it will be very quick—you will not feel a thing.”

  Jenkins had lost his hat. He fumbled on the floor for it. “We’ll stop you,” he said, red-faced over the table-top. “You’ll be sorry you ever opened your mouth to me, mister. I’ll spread this from here to Belfast.”

  “You are going to tell?” the alien asked, in dull surprise.

  “You bet your sweet life I’m going to tell!”

  Pendrath nodded owlishly. “It does not matter now. The work is nearly done. You cannot stop us, my poor friend.”

  The story broke the following day, when the installation of the complex system of girders and braces in the interior of the building had already been finished. A hatch in the side of the ship was open, and under the aliens’ direction, crews were carrying out a steady stream of machine parts to be assembled inside the building.

  There were a thousand and one pieces of different sizes and shapes: gigantic torus sections, tubes, cylinders, globes; twisted pipes, jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The material was not metal, but the same light substance the tools were made of.

  Some of the tools were serving as grip-sticks: they clung like magnets to the machine parts, and to nothing else. Some, applied to massive pieces of equipment, made them extraordinarily slippery, so that it was easy to slide them across the site and into the building. Others were used in assembling: drawn along the join between two pieces, they made the two flow together into one.

  The story did not reach the day shift at all. The second and third shifts turned up a little under strength; the aliens hired enough people from the crowd of curiosity-seekers to make up the difference.

  At his regular press conference, the alien spokesman, Mr. Revashgo Ren, said, “Mr. Jenkins’ story is a malicious fabrication. The machines you mention will provide pleasant heating, air conditioning, Galactic standard gravitation, and other necessary services for the clerical workers in our offices. We are accustomed to have many conveniences of this kind, and that is why we cannot live or work in buildings suitable for you.”

  Hersch of the Times demanded, “Why does that take a half-mile area, when your office space is only a thin ring around the outside of the building?”

  Revash smiled. “Why do you take a whole cellar to heat your buildings?” he asked. “One of your savages would say that a fire of sticks and a hole in the ceiling are sufficient.”

  Hersch had no answer to that; nevertheless, belief in the story spread. By the end of the week, half a dozen newspapers were thumping the drum for a crusade. A Congressional investigating committee was appointed. More workers quit. When the labour supply slackened, the aliens doubled the pay, and got more applicants than there were jobs. Riots broke out on the Jersey side of the tubes. There were picket lines, fulminations from the pulpit, attempts at sabotage. The work went on just the same.

  “The whole problem is psychological,” said Baker. “We know what kind of people they are—it sticks out all over them—they’re decadent. That’s their weak point; that’s where we’ve got to hit them. They’ve got the perfect machines, but they don’t know how to use them. Not only that, they don’t want to; it would soil their lily-white hands. So they come here, and they get us to do their dirty work, even though it means an extra risk.”

  “That doesn’t sound so decadent to me,” said Cooley argumentatively. It was past midnight, and they were still sitting in Baker’s living room over a case of beer, hashing it all out. Cooley’s face was flushed, and his voice a little loud. “Take an archaeological expedition, say—I don’t know, maybe to Mesopotamia or somewhere. Do they drag along a lot of pick and shovel men? They do not; they take the shovels, maybe, but they hire native labour on the spot. That isn’t decadence, that’s efficiency.”

  “All right, but if we had to, we could get out there and pick up a shovel. They can’t. It just wouldn’t occur to them. They’re over-refined, Ted; they’ve got to the point where the machines have to be perfect, or they couldn’t stay alive. That’s dangerous; that’s where we’ve got to hit them.”

  “I don’t see it. Wars are won with weapons.”

  “So what are we supposed to do, hit them with atom bombs that don’t go off, or guns that don’t shoot?”

  Cooley put down his stein and reached for the tool that lay on the floor. It had rolled the last time he put it down. He said, “Damn,” and reached farther. He picked it up, the same “idiot stick” he had stolen from the Galactic site the first day. “I’m betting on this,” he said. “You know and I know they’re working on it, day and night, I’m betting they’ll crack it. This is a weapon, boy—a Galact
ic weapon. If we just get that—”

  “Go ahead, wish for the moon,” said Baker bitterly. “What you’re talking about happens to be impossible. We can change the stress patterns in the control tabs, yes. We can even duplicate the formative conditions, probably, and get as many tabs as you want with the same pattern. But it’s empirical, Ted, just blind chance. We don’t know why such and such a stress pattern makes the tool do a certain thing, and until we know that, all we can do is vary it at random.”

  “So?”

  “So there are millions of wrong patterns for every right one. There’re the patterns that make things explode, like in Washington; there’re the ones that boil the experimenter alive or freeze him solid, or bury him in a big lump of solid lead. There’re the radioactive ones, the corrosive ones—and for every wrong guess, we lose at least one man.”

  “Remote control?” said Cooley.

  “First figure out what makes the tools operate when somebody’s holding them, and stop when they let go.”

  Cooley drank, frowning.

  “And remember,” said Baker, “there’s just about one choice that would do us any good against the Galactics. One pattern, out of millions. No. It won’t be technology that licks them; it’ll be guts.”

  He was right; but he was wrong.

  Al Jenkins was in the Star—Ledger city room, gloomily reading a wire story about denunciations of the aliens issued by governors of eight states. “What good is that?” he said, tossing it back onto the city editor’s desk. “Look at it.”

  Through the window, they could see the top of the alien building shining in the distance. Tiny figures were crawling over the domed roof. The aliens had inflated a hemispherical membrane, and now the workers were going over it with the tools, forming a solid layer.

  The dome was almost finished. Work on the interior of the building had stopped two days before.

  “He knew what he was talking about,” said Jenkins. “We couldn’t stop them. We had three weeks to do it in, but we just couldn’t get together that fast.”

  Cigarette ash was spilling down the front of his shirt. He scrubbed at it absently, turned, and walked out of the office. The editor watched him go without saying anything.

  One morning in July, two months after the aliens’ landing, a ragged mob armed with Galactic tools appeared near the spaceship. Similar mobs had formed several times during the last few nights. When a native grew desperate, he lost what little intelligence he had.

  The officer in charge, standing in the open doorway, looked them over disdainfully as they approached. There was no need for any defensive measures; they would try to club him with the tools, fail, and go away.

  The native in the lead, a big, burly male, raised his tool like a pitchfork. The Galactic watched him with amusement. The next instant, he was dead, turned into bloody mush on the floor of the airlock.

  The mob poured into the ship. Inside, the green-lit hallways were as dim and vast as a cathedral. Bored Galactics looked out of doorways. Their bland expressions changed to gapes of horror. Some ran; some hid. The tools cut them down.

  The long corridors echoed to the rattle of running feet, to shouts of excitement and triumph, screams of dismay. The mob swept into every room; it was over in fifteen minutes.

  The victors stopped, panting and sweaty, looking around them with the beginnings of wonder. The high-ceilinged rooms were hung with gleaming gold-and-green tapestries; the desks were carved crystal. Music breathed from somewhere, soothing and quiet.

  A tray of food was steaming on a table. A transparent chart had been pulled out of a wall. Under each was a pulpy red smear, a puddle of disorganized tissue.

  Baker and Cooley looked up and recognized each other.

  “Guts,” said Baker wryly.

  “Technology,” said Cooley. “They underrated us; so did you.” He raised the tool he held, careful not to touch the butt. “Ten thousand tries, I hear—and ten thousand dead men. All right, have it your way. I call that guts, too.” He lifted his head, staring off into the distance, trying to imagine the hundreds of research stations, hidden in remote areas, with their dally, ghastly toll of human life. “Ten thousand,” he said.

  Baker was shaking with reaction. “We were lucky; it might have been a million…” He tried to laugh. “Have to find a new name for this now—no more idiot stick.”

  Cooley glanced at the floor. “It depends,” he said grimly, “which end of the stick the idiot’s on.”

  THING OF BEAUTY

  There was a time slip in Southern California at about one in the afternoon. Mr. Gordon Fish thought it was an earthquake. He woke up confused and sullen from his midday nap, blinking fiercely, as pink as a spanked baby’s behind, with his sandy-yellow beard and eyebrows bristling. He got off the sofa and listened. No screams, no rumble of falling buildings, so probably it was all right.

  He heard a knock.

  Squinting uneasily, Fish went to the door. He had left his glasses on the table, but never mind; it might be a client, or even an investigator from the city. In which case… He opened the door.

  A slender man in purple was standing there. He was small, hardly an inch taller than Gordon Fish. He said, “Three twenty-two and a half Platt Terrace?” His face was an oval blur; he seemed to be wearing some kind of tight uniform, like a bellboy’s—but purple?

  “That’s right, three twenty-two and a half, this is it,” said Fish, straining to make out the fellow’s salmon-coloured face. He caught sight of some other people standing behind him, and a shadowy bulk, like a big box of some kind. “I don’t know if you—”

  “All right, fezh, bring it in,” said the man, turning to speak over his shoulder. “Bung, did we have a time finding you,” he said to Fish, and pushed his way into the living room. Behind him, other men in tight purple clothing came staggering under the weight of boxes, first a big one, then two smaller ones, then a really big one, then a clutter of smaller boxes.

  “Listen, wait, there must be some mistake,” said Fish, dancing out of the way. “I didn’t order—”

  The first man in purple looked at some papers in his hand.

  “Three twenty-two and a half Platt Terrace?” he said. His voice sounded slurred and angry, as if he were half drunk or had just woken up, like Fish himself.

  Fish was unreasonably irritated. “I tell you I didn’t order anything! I don’t care if—You walk in here, into a man’s home, just like—Listen! You get out of there!” Infuriated, he rushed at two of the men who were setting down one of the . smaller boxes on the sofa.

  “This is the address,” said the first man in a bored voice. He shoved some papers into Fish’s hand. “You don’t want ’em, send ’em back. We just deliver ’em.” The purple men began to move toward the door.

  The spokesman went out last. “Bung, are you a dvich!” he said, and closed the door.

  Raging, Fish fumbled for his glasses. They ought to be right there, but the movers had upset everything. He went to the door anyway, twitching with anger. Dammit, if he could just find his glasses he’d report them, but… He opened the door. The purple-uniformed men, a little knot of them, were standing in the courtyard looking bewildered. One of them turned a salmon-coloured dot of a face. “Hey, which way is…” Something. It sounded like “enchmire”.

  There was a tremor, and Fish lurched against the door frame. It felt like an earth shock, a heavy one, but when he looked up the palm trees in the street were not swaying, and the buildings were solid and firm. But the purple men were gone.

  Swearing frantically to himself, Fish went back into the living room and slammed the door behind him. The biggest box was in his way. He kicked it, and a slat fell out. He kicked it again,grunting with angry satisfaction. The whole side fell down with a clatter, revealing a black-enamelled panel. Fish kicked that, and bruised his toe.

  “Hm,” said Fish, looking at the sleek black finish of whatever it was. “Hah.” It looked like money. Peering, he ran his finger along the meta
l. Cool and smooth. Why, it might be almost anything. Industrial machinery, worth thousands of dollars to the right party. With rising excitement, Fish ran to the table, found his glasses pushed into some magazines, and ran back, fitting the glasses over his mean little eyes.

  He pulled some more slats aside. The box fell away, disclosing an oddly shaped hunk of metal with knobs, dials and switches in the top. An engraved white plate read: “TECKNING MASKIN”, and then some numbers. It sounded ominous and important. Heart beating, Fish rubbed his fingers over the knurled knobs and the gleaming switch handles. There was a faint click. He had accidentally moved one switch, he saw, from “Av” to “På”. The dials were lighting up, and a set of long hooked arms, like claws, were slowly drifting out over the flat empty space in the middle.

  Hastily, Fish turned the switch back to “Av”. The lights went out; the arms, looking disappointed, he thought, drifted back into their enclosures.

  Well, it worked, whatever it was, which was funny, because come to think of it he hadn’t plugged it in anywhere. Fish stared at the machine uneasily, rubbing his podgy hands together. Batteries? In a machine that size? And those funny dials, the peculiar expression the whole thing had, and “Teckning Maskin”—not even English. There it sat, all eight or nine pieces of it, filling up his living room—one crate, he saw with a pang, blocked off his view of the TV. Suppose it was all some kind of joke?

  The instant he thought of it, he saw the whole thing in a flash. The crates sitting here, and then in a few days the bill would come in the mail—maybe they wouldn’t even take the things away until he’d paid the shipping—and all the time, the joker would be laughing himself sick. Laughing, whoever it was that had ordered the machines in Fish’s name—some old enemy, or it could even be someone he thought of as a friend.

  With tears of rage in his eyes, he rushed to the door again, flung it open and stood panting, staring around the courtyard. But there was nobody there. He slammed the door and stood looking helplessly at the crates. If they would fight fair! How was he going to watch Dragnet, and, good heaven, where was he going to talk to clients—in the kitchen?